Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and...

How can students of the European Union get from describing recent advances, to speculating about what are possible new directions and research agendas? How promising are terms such as “governance” and “the new governance” for improving the understanding how the Union is overned and...

To sketch an institutional approach, this paper elaborates ideas presented over 20 years ago in The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life (March and Olsen 1984). Institutionalism, as that term is used here, connotes a general approach to the study of political...

Against the backdrop of decades of public sector reforms in Europe, this essay aims to make sense of the processes through which institutions, democratic government included, achieve and lose autonomy or primacy and why it is difficult to find a state of equilibrium between democratic government...

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to undermine political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards the robustness of these findings. In this paper we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from...

This section (1) presents three landmark articles that are part of a research agenda launched more than twenty years ago. Then, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life” invited a reappraisal of how political institutions could be conceptualized, to what degree...

Institutions based upon the systematic separation of different decision functions may stimulate deliberative decision-making, if they hinder negotiators from introducing their bargaining power into the negotiation process. Such arrangements exist for the regulation of requirements for health and...

This paper highlights one of the major benefits of qualitative comparative methodology as applied within a “small-N” research design, namely its potential use for specifying the scope conditions of (theoretically competing) causal mechanisms. It is argued that the identification of...

Quantitative research in the field of European Union (EU) politics has focused on the internal dynamics of either the Council of Ministers (the Council) or the European Parliament (the Parliament). Theoretical accounts of bicameralism in the EU have understood the Parliament as a unitary actor....

This paper aims at contributing to the empirical turn in deliberative theory, by analysing the presence of arguing and bargaining in the working groups of the Council of the EU. To what extent is arguing an important mode of decision-making in the Council, what circumstances make arguing more...